2017 Steering Committee

2017 Steering Committee

Sanjay Sarma, Vice President for Open Learning, MIT Sanjay Sarma is the Vice President for Open Learning. He also leads the Office of Digital Learning, which oversees MIT OpenCourseWare and supports the development and use of digital technology for on-campus teaching and massive open online courses (MOOCs). He is also the Fred Fort Flowers (1941) and Daniel Fort Flowers (1941) Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. A co-founder of the Auto-ID Center at MIT, Sarma developed many of the key technologies behind the EPC suite of RFID standards now used worldwide. He was the founder and CTO of OATSystems, which was acquired by Checkpoint Systems (NYSE: CKP) in 2008, and he has worked at Schlumberger Oilfield Services in Aberdeen, UK, and at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories in Berkeley, California. Currently, Sarma serves on the boards of GS1, EPCglobal; several startup companies including Senaya and ESSESS; and edX, the not-for-profit company set up by MIT and Harvard to create and promulgate an open-source platform for the distribution of free online education worldwide. He also advises several national governments and global companies. Author of more than 75 academic papers in computational geometry, sensing, RFID, automation, and CAD, Sarma is the recipient of numerous awards for teaching and research, including the MacVicar Fellowship, the Business Week eBiz Award, and InformationWeek's Innovators and Influencers Award. He received his bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, his master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University, and his Ph.D from the University of California at Berkeley.

Peter Bol, Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages Civilization, Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, Harvard UniversityPeter K. Bol is the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning and the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. As Vice Provost (named in 2013/09) he is responsible for HarvardX, the Harvard Initiative in Learning and Teaching, and research that connects online and residential learning. Together with William Kirby, he teaches ChinaX (SW12x) course, one of the HarvardX courses. His research is centered on the history of China’s cultural elites at the national and local levels from the 7th to the 17th century. He is the author of "This Culture of Ours": Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China, Neo-Confucianism in History; coauthor of Sung Dynasty Uses of the I-ching; co-editor of Ways with Words, and various journal articles in Chinese, Japanese, and English. He led Harvard’s university-wide effort to establish support for geospatial analysis in teaching and research. In 2005 he was named the first director of the Center for Geographic Analysis. He also directs the China Historical Geographic Information Systems project, a collaboration between Harvard and Fudan University in Shanghai to create a GIS for 2000 years of Chinese history. In a collaboration between Harvard, Academia Sinica, and Peking University he directs the China Biographical Database project, an online relational database currently featuring 380,000 historical figures, which is being expanded to include all biographical data in China's historical record over the last 2000 years.

Eric Grimson, Chancellor for Academic Advancement, MITEric Grimson is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT and holds the Bernard Gordon Chair of Medical Engineering at MIT. He also holds a joint appointment as a Lecturer on Radiology at Harvard Medical School and at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Between 2011 and 2014 he served as the Chancellor for MIT, having previously served as the Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He currently serves as Chancellor for Academic Advancement for MIT. He received a B.Sc. (High Honors) in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Regina in 1975 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT in 1980. Prof. Grimson's research group pioneered state-of-the art systems for activity and behavior recognition, object and person recognition, image database indexing, image guided surgery, site modeling and many other areas of computer vision. Prof. Grimson is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the IEEE, and was awarded the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching in the School of Engineering at MIT.

Catherine Koshland, Professor, Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education, University of California, Berkeley.Catherine Koshland is the Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Wood-Calvert Professor in Engineering. She is a professor of Environmental Health Sciences in the School of Public Health and a professor in the Energy and Resources Group. Professor Koshland graduated with a B.A. in Fine Arts from Haverford College, studied painting at the New York School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, and received her M.S. in 1978 and her Ph.D. in 1985 in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. She was a former member of the Haverford College Board of Managers from 1994 – 2014, served as Board Co-Chair from 2005 – 2009, and Chair from 2009 - 2014. Among Vice Chancellor Koshland’s responsibilities are major operating units, including University Extension; Summer Sessions, Study Abroad and Lifelong Learning; the Student Learning Center; the Athletic Study Center; The Center for Teaching and Learning; and Educational Technology Services; American Cultures; The BLUM Center, and Berkeley Connect. Her office is responsible for several strategic academic initiatives, as well as providing support to faculty development in teaching and learning. In addition, her office advises on enrollment planning and management and serves as a liaison for academic units with many campus administrative offices. She co-chairs the Undergraduate Initiative with Provost Claude Steele.

John Mitchell, Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor in the School of Engineering, and Professor of Computer Science and (by courtesy) Electrical Engineering, Stanford University.John Mitchell has been Vice Provost at Stanford University since 2012, first as the inaugural Vice Provost for Online Learning and now in a broader role for Teaching and Learning. His team has worked with more than 330 Stanford faculty members and instructors on 720 online projects for campus or public audiences; transitioned faculty and students to a new university-wide course evaluation system and a new learning management system, and initiated the Year of Learning to envision the future of teaching and learning at Stanford and beyond. As co-director of the Lytics Lab, he is working to improve educational outcomes through data-driven research and iterative design. Mitchell is the Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor in the School of Engineering, professor of computer science, and (by courtesy) professor of electrical engineering and of education. His past research has focused on computer security, developing analysis methods and improving network protocol security, authorization and access control, web security, and privacy. He is a member of the steering committee for Stanford University’s Cyber Initiative. Mitchell’s first research project in online learning started in 2009, when he and six undergraduate students built Stanford CourseWare, an innovative platform that expanded to support interactive video and discussion. CourseWare served as the foundation for initial flipped classroom experiments at Stanford and helped inspire the first massive open online courses (MOOCs) from Stanford. He received his BS from Stanford and his MS and Ph.D from MIT.